Guild Wars 2

I don’t really play much anymore thanks to the bots but I was in cursed shore for a couple hours doing events today. I have full MF armor with pirate runes and a traveler medallion for the 6th, explorer GS of luck, and MF accessories. Got 1 rare during that time.

A week or two ago I would usually get 1 rare most events, and some of those that presented me rares would give me 2-3.

Today was a small sample so it’s anecdotal sure. But it’s enough to make me think about it. If they do change things like this it’s exactly the sort of thing that’s important to put in patch notes, ninja loot patches are never good.

Ban the bots.

Also yeah, scaling needs to be harder. Whether it’s DEs scaling up further to be challenging for however many people are there, or low level areas scaling you down more so you can actually play with friends without killing everything before they can even touch it (and if it’s more challening for high levels, rewards can be ramped up for them.)

I miss the old chests too. You were guaranteed certain qualities and things from those chests that made you look forward to opening them. Now it’s like digging through a trash bin. Very rewarding huh.

I also miss being rewarded with stuff I could actually use, probably wanted, and was uniquely skinned for finishing a campaign. Now we get RNG wheels of death that are about as likely to give us something we can use as the chests are, and probably just as valuable.

How about Nick? Gotta buy our gifts with gems now, and get constantly nagwared by the high drop rate of the chests…

Respawning at the last waypoint without getting nyerked with a noticeable fee. What happened to what was it, “dying doesn’t need to be punished, you already died” or w/e from that PR vid.

One vs Zerg. Zerg wins. I don’t see the problem?
Standing in 10 AoE fields gets you killed pretty fast. Again, problem?

Is it really that hard to realize that maybe the solutions are to… not do these things that get you killed easily?

The Holidays & Events team already failed massively. They didn’t get me my grog for TLAPD!

Jenna. Maybe Countess Anise <.<

90 may have been standard in id games but I don’t know anybody that was in any way serious about them (even if it just meant that they liked to win occasionally in pub servers) that didn’t run much higher than that. Maybe these modern fovs don’t matter so much in a point and click adventure game or dpad console hallway shooter, but if situational awareness is in any way important to success then anet needs to start giving a kitten and let us actually have situational awareness.

GW didn’t have a super wide fov but we still had situational awareness because of the radar and longer zoom. If we’re not going to have either of those then we need an fov slider plain and simple. And I’m not talking up to a whopping 75.

I see alot of people crying that Gems → Gold should be much more profitable to compete with gold sellers. This is a straight up bad idea. The gem store is so integrated into gameplay that it’s almost necessary to purchase from it. And items like portable repair kits I’m sure will become absolutely necessary to play in areas to come, the hardcore difficulty stuff like UW or DoA that anet is known for. If these things start costing on the order of several gold each then GW2 becomes nothing more than any other korean F2P pay to win mmo.

It’s pretty clear with the conversion tariffs that anet doesn’t want players converting real world money into in game wealth and power. If that’s what YOU want to do, then I’d suggest playing one of those pay to win mmos.

The solution to the gold sellers and bots? Ban them before they profit. (period)

I don’t care if they tell me how their anti-botting measures work. But I can’t log in without running into bots interfering so badly with my experience that I end up logging off in frustration. Whether it’s taking half an hour to finish a single heart on my lowbies because all of the heart mobs are getting destroyed by much higher level bots before I can even tag them, or taking all of the mobs my main needs to gather the mats to make the rest of his gear.

They block my progress daily and I haven’t seen anything substantial from Anet. That’s what I care about. Well that’s not true, they’ve substantially lowered the loot and rewards I get from the mobs that I do get to kill…

I’m not really happy with most of the heavy armor
Even the T3 human racial has issues (those kitten hip plates!)

Ooo, that’s a cool looing guardian you have there.

Yea, AC and CM are the two easiest dungeons IMO, they really do get harder. Remember even the explorable versions of these are meant to be doable by people at those levels, in that level gear. And you’re going in there with enough armor rating to get downscaled to max, and level 80 gold substats. Once you’re talking about the level 80 dungeons it’s a different story.

There’s an argument for knowing how to dodge sure but guardians will always be taking hits with their low range and especially if they’re performing one of their best roles (balling foes for aoe.) Although this holds true for anybody melee’ing, you will get hit no matter how good you are. And at later dungeons, those hits nyerking hurt.

I love my EV skinned crafted Explorer’s GS of Luck. I just wish its black parts were… black, it really stands out in a bad way if you’re wearing black armor. Also that I had something worth killing with it that wasn’t getting killed by 10 bots before I can get close enough to hit them making me log off in frustration with an ever growing feeling that the Anet I always loved has been replaced in full by ncsoft’s worst and dullest.

On a less gloomy note, I would definitely suggest using those rares to help you make the money to buy some crafted exotics before considering yourself instance ready (assuming you mean ready to farm them.) The difference is night and day, and you’ll still be getting melted for making a mistake wearing exotics in the later dungeons. In rares it’s just so masochistic you won’t even technically need to make a mistake in the first place.

Your moment of clarity is still perfectly true though, those exotics can be had in less than a week of casual play.

With warrior you get perma 33%, 15 sec cantrip with a condition removal, a full cleanse and more dodges with stam sig, a charge and leap, invuln, you can spec less falling damage for shortcuts, a ranged aoe cripple + immobilize with traited bladetrail, and of course they can just turn around and faceroll a chaser. You can even slot fear bomb, more mobility, or plenty of other fun options while still retaining your base mobility since none of your slot skills are needed for it.

Of course thief stealth and shadowsteps can help a lot with escaping zergs. Being squishy kinda sucks when you do get caught (especially since you’ll be low on initiative) but having a passive 25% gives you more flexibility than relying on your elite and a specific weapon you might not want to fight with though you will be slower overall. Shortbow for skill mobility is nice because it’s your aoe weapon for the zergs anyway, besides being an all around good weapon to fight with. Whereas a warrior runner has to give up their only good ranged aoe for sword/horn which is passable but definitely not that amazing when you’re forced into a fight.

That armor, hp, and attack on war goes a long way IMO, but there are definitely advantages and trade offs either way. I just wouldn’t go ele unless you like to squish when someone looks at you. I pick them out of full groups of 5, stomp, and loot before going down on my war. Imagine solo ele.

In short for max speed and fighting prowess go war.
For getting out of sticky situations with ninja skills at the cost of some run speed and alot of physical survivability, but retention of aoe hijinks go thief.
To dispense badges to the enemy go ele.

note: There may be another warrior run build involving slotting a banner that will let you forgo the warhorn, but you’ll have to trait higher in tactics to keep max longbow range. Tactics war is however plenty useful at the sieges and may offset some of the tradeoffs while still being able to run effectively. I haven’t tested such a build for running yet, but I’ll do that today.

If anything the respawn rates should be raised, I mean as long as I’m going to have to compete with bots that aren’t burdened by having to actually travel between the mobs then I think it’s only fair so that I get a shot at tagging some loot myself.

I’m with a few others here, I’ll believe it when I stop having my personal progress slowed or even stopped by bots that are still around 2+ weeks after being reported (a couple even 3 weeks.)

I really hope you guys aren’t relying purely relying on automated systems to determine if a reported bot is actually a bot. Kinda seems like that right now, and I’m sure the botters are more than used to coding detection avoidance into their scripts. Don’t make it an “our programmer vs. theirs” thing because you will lose. Keep some eyes on the ground and you’ll be 1000 times more effective.

2) On to dungeon rewards, I propose that the diminishing exp system be removed or altered to allow dungeons to become a viable leveling path again. Many of us would love to be able to focus on leveling in a single dungeon to begin working on our chosen token grinds as soon as it’s available and I don’t see a reason to make us do other dungeons that we don’t want to do or even enjoy.

The coin rewards however are removed completely. The coin is to be replaced by the chose your own reward system. Either a free repair to cover one of the main gripes people who are forced to PuG or generally unskilled play, or a Black Lion Key as a reward for skilled death free play. The repair would bring the armor breaking mechanic some love in dungeons as players would be encouraged to see if they can make it to the end without repairing, teasing groups that die regularly with risk/reward. The key would go a long way in making the chests have some actual value as many more would be opened and also make them seem like far less of a nagware money grab like they currently do.

I also propose that the final chest itself be revamped akin to GW dungeon chests. Giving us a guaranteed equipment drop of our closest level tier and of at least gold rarity on the first run of a series (the first run of a dungeon within X time.) Even if oranges are rare at least we’ll have something to salvage for ecto. Each dungeon could have a specific set of rarer world skins for the oranges that drop from its final chest and later unique skins though of course not the dungeon token skins. This would also be a good target for design-a-weapon contests that we all loved the fruits of in GW. There would also be other set types of rewards in the list as we have now, that do not scale with repeated runs. A tonic, a rune/medallion/sigil, and I would like to see crafting mats of your level tier added. Making these changes to the final chest would give people that do not necessarily want to grind tokens an incentive to run them and give dungeon runners more people to play with! Especially in the case of dungeons like AC where the gear from tokens is not max level.

3) Remove the choice of which path you take. Just kidding. Even better, make that the target of “balancing” repeated fast runs by removing the choice if a dungeon is repeated in X amount of time. Let’s face it, when given the option those of us grinding out a dungeon will always chose the easiest path and the easiest path is a large reason why dungeon rewards needed a nerf, even if it was too heavy handed. By forcing repeat runs to explore a random path the difficulty of the dungeon as a whole comes into play and makes balancing dungeons for hardcore crowds much simpler. Additionally it will become easier to finish your dungeon achievements as you won’t have to try to convince the farming groups you find to explore a different path that you need and will just happen naturally. Many more players will get to see all of the work that the dungeon krewe did. The token grind will suddenly feel less grindy for the simple reason that we’re not doing the exact same thing run after run. And even better, we might start seeing some challenge in our token farming again.

First I’ll look at some of my views of the current situation revolving around dungeons.

One of the reasons people are speed farming dungeons is to get their max stat starter sets. Many people feel like once they’re 80 they must get a max set before participating in end-gaming and would obviously chose the fastest and easiest method.

The amount of time, effort, and gold it takes to get max gear goes makes these players fall into the trap of “the work before the fun starts” goes against the philosophy that we heard so much about leading up to release. It’s also directly contrary to the Guild Wars that so many of us loved and likely expected to see more of from 2.

Now it’s also true that the coin rewards had a great potential to quickly inflate the economy and we were already starting to see these effects as more people started jumping on the speed farming band wagon. The story mode nerfs after first completion I really can’t argue against as I see the value of them, nor can I say that the coin rewards from explorable farming need to remain as they were for the same reason.

However many of us as players have a need to farm these things, be it for skins, runes, legendaries, levelling, whatever. Many of us also enjoy the dungeons and prefer it to be our primary gaming experience. A large part of making it feel like a game rather than a grind however are the short term rewards, especially with the cost of dungeon gear and how long it will take to reach our goals. To this end I propose 3 simple changes that keep in the spirit of Guild Wars:

1) Add an easily obtainable “starter set.” Tying it into the completion of the campaign would be great. For armor I would suggest a vendor becomes available in Fort Trinity after completion. This armor would be exotic level 80 and unsalvagable. For skins a cool combination of later tier skins would be fine.

Now… the sub stats and runes on this armor would not be ideal for any specific class or build. They would buff the most common damage/defense/support stats such as power, condition damage, toughness, vitality, and healing power in varying degrees, to provide a balanced armor set that pretty much anybody could use and feel capable of end-gaming with while still providing motivation to get a set with your own favorite stats. Much like the weapons available for completing Prophecies were not ideal, but were still enough for max level play.

The cost of this set should be low, perhaps no more than 3g for the entire set or somewhere close to that, be obtainable only once per character, and come in a box rather than individual pieces. Or if the skins are nice and we might want to re-obtain them for transmuting other sets the price could rise for subsequent sets.

For the weapons aspect of the starter set I would then suggest a system akin to what we had in Guild Wars. In your celebration instance you get to chose 2 (to cover main hand/off hand users and weapon swapping that we now have as a very integral mechanic) 80 exotics. Again these would not provide ideal stats, but a combination that could be used by any class/build. This would of course ditch the crumby wheel of death bags that even if they were working as intended, likely wouldn’t reward us with things we could even equip much less use.

All of this would remove the grind before the fun feeling of gearing at 80 which despite your intentions has persisted and remind us all what made Guild Wars and power grind-free game play great.

If this is about botters and gold farmers all I can say is ban China and give us players our game back. If that’s not sound business or whatever at least put more effort into getting bans out for the ones reported faster. They’re spending their time ruining a lot of players gameplay with these patches, while bots roam for over a week without getting banned despite getting reported by many people… I am disappoint. Drive off the gold sellers with harder security and policing, not by making crumby mechanics for everybody!

I’m running 12’s atm, 1 invis for weapon and gear swaps, 1 invis for kits, tools, with some space left over for things I find that I don’t want to sell just yet. I hardly find that unreasonable, yet I will regularly have to start salvaging stuff that I would RATHER MERCHANT right smack in the middle of an event or dungeon. Even though I empty my other 3 bags every time I go anywhere near a merchant.

So no, 8’s are not enough for everyone.

That said this is far better than GW inventories. I just think 2/10 gold is way too out there, especially considering that getting max gear when you get to 80 is nowhere near as easy as in GW. Most of your money and time is going to be going towards that for the foreseeable future. And god help you if you want to 400 a craft. Or you like to travel (5s fast travel fees? Really?) 1/5g would at least allow you to get decent bag space to help you in your efforts, and still have the prestige feeling when you finally get your 20’s.

Close to finishing my story and the lack of communication on this is really disheartening. I have a question for Anet, is ncsoft telling you guys how to design MMOs now? Lineage and Aion were full of this kind of design and GW was the exact opposite, which was a large part of why it was such a great game and a breath of fresh air even going on a decade after its release. Finish a campaign? Max weapon of your choice with nice sub stats and, with few exceptions, a unique skin. Now we get to spin an NCwheel of death to celebrate our victory?